This is the fourth (and final) of Robert Walker's Edge thrillers featuring Houston PD Lieutenant Lucas Stonecoat, and it's a corker. Just when you think all's been said or done when it comes to serial killers, somebody as talented as Walker comes along to remind you that there are as many ways and means and reasons to murder as there are people on this earth. A cursory glance at the paper or the Internet will surely convince that thriller writers don't have to make up all that much these days—whatever we can devise has already been surpassed by reality.

Lucas Stonecoat is a near-perfect protagonist, heroic in all the right ways and yet occasionally prone to stubborn denial. As a Cherokee who worked his way off the reservation when so many others did not, he has dealt with both racism and its reverse counterpart. His Vietnam near-death experience has left him with chronic pain and a tendency to self-medicate with peyote to dull it, a sort of psychic sixth sense also attributable to his people's mystic heritage, and a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He has revamped Houston PD's Cold Case set-up, dragging it into the computer age and becoming something of a celebrity due to a reputation for solving long-abandoned cases.

In this outing, the legendary Houston cop receives a package of human remains, catapulting him into a serial killer tale every bit as grotesque as anything ever devised by Thomas Harris or James Patterson. While Lucas receives slices of inner organs, his friend and colleague (and former lover) Dr. Meredyth Sanger, a police psychiatrist, receives eyeballs and teeth culled from the same victim. Reluctantly agreeing that they have been targeted by a depraved killer for his own evil purposes, Lucas and Meredyth find themselves on a task force charged with bringing the murderer to justice. But readers are privy to the truth: the killer is not one, but two people—Arthur and Lauralie—one driven by the other's insane need for revenge for an incident almost twenty years old. Indeed, these antagonists are extremely well-drawn, and do not wrest control of the novel as they might have.

Thrown together again by their membership on the task force, Lucas and Meredyth soon rekindle their affair amidst the knowledge that at any time one or the other may become the next victim. They must also fight their own discomfort with commitment, something they both desperately want, but desperately fear. The relationship between the two protagonists rings true because it is so tentative.

Beginning with the ax decapitation of a symbolically-named victim, Final Edge seethes and pulses in realistic ebbs and flows as clues become available and are run down. The killers fuel the action by escalating their gruesome package deliveries, culminating in a Grand Guignol task force examination of the package which contains the victim's head. The nature of the killers' relationship is part of the fun and should therefore be kept out of this review, but suffice to say that it is an entertaining pairing of needs and motives, as well as a subtle indictment of over-taxed social welfare agencies. While attempting to stay ahead of the killers in the main plot, Lucas also ruminates on a cold case, stubbornly wishing to bring rest to the ghost of a little girl murdered decades before. When the body count rises dramatically toward the end, the book becomes a grim salute to its Cherokee cop hero and his noble approach to righting wrongs.

Robert Walker is no slouch when it comes to police procedurals, covering the bases with endlessly realistic details of forensic and investigative jurisdictional minutiae that convince fully while rolling the plots forward to shocking conclusions. Here and there dialogue is peppered with a strange formality, an almost overly literate patois which seems sometimes out of place but also recalls the literary bantering of officers on the TV show Homicide: Life on the Street. The effect is to give the characters' words and views more weight and substance, raising the novel's tone without sacrificing the action. Indeed, the main ending is a satisfyingly grim confrontation of the first order! It's a shame the author appears to have written his last Lucas Stonecoat novel, but one can still check out his Instinct series and his sizzling Evan Kingsbury debut, Fire & Flesh.